So, on our first day here we decided to go on a hike. There's this giant mountain in the town, and it's got this like little chapel on top and the giant cross, and somebody in like the group said, "Hey, let's go hiking." And I didn't think they meant like the giant mountain, on day one in the middle of the day, as "Let's go hiking." But you know, I was like, "What else am I gonna do, sit around?" I didn't really wanna sit around. I'm trying to like do one -- like go to class and then do like one thing out in the afternoon each day. So I decided to go and oh my gosh, we had to walk uphill all the way across the entire town to even get to the mountain. So I was kind of like sweating it already when we got there. And then that thing was steep. It was so, so steep. And my group, they were like running. I'm like, "I have no idea how the heck you guys are going that fast." Like, I was trying to stop and get water, and at one point, a couple of the girls, we like stopped. And we like sat down and then three of them left, but my one friend and I stayed back for a minute because she has asthma. And I was like, "Okay, well, I'm not gonna like leave you because you're like the only person on this entire trip that I know. So we are gonna take it up nice and slow." So, by this point, because we waited a whole like three minutes, and we're like, halfway up this mountain, the group is nowhere in sight. So we're just like going along and we're following the path, and we get to this point where there's two different roads you can take. One is kind of like roped off and looks a little bit sketchy. And the other one is like up stairs, like, in the vague direction of the cross, which is where we're trying to get to on the top of this mountain. So we go up the stairs, and then there's like a bunch of things that are like kind of paths but not really. And we like try to follow the best ones, but we're pretty sure that we're like not exactly on…

Every morning the boat picked us up at 6 a.m. and they said, “Well, we'll be fishing until about two o'clock,” but most of the days, we'd quit maybe a half hour early. So we fished for four days from Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday from six in the morning until close to two in the afternoon. And the first day we were there, we went out for a tuna fish, and we ended up, I think we caught maybe about 100 pounds of tuna. The tuna was weighed probably about fifty or sixty pounds each and -- had a lot of fun bringing him in. The first one I was bringing in a shark took a bite out of it, but that's not an uncommon event there, that the shark sees that you've got a fish on the line and it’s vulnerable and it takes a sample. So, that was our first day of fishing. And the second day, I had never in my life, caught a bill fish. So, we went out looking for marlin. And I managed to hook one that weighed about 260 or 70 pounds. And took me about a half hour to reel it in and probably I was somewhat fortunate in that the marlin had totally swallowed my bait. And when he came, in the marlin was dead. So then you got the problem of trying to get a 260 pound fish into the boat and our captain and his helper managed to do that by taking a towel and wrapping it around that big sword on the front of the fish and getting its head up onto the edge of the boat and then slowly bringing it in like, maybe a foot at a time with tugging on it and bending on that sword to have some some leverage and still having some of the fish's body down in the water. But we managed to get that all in.

Have I ever had to be the bearer of bad news? Well, yes and I guess I thought of -- my mind immediately went to times when I've had to bear the worst news of all, which is that someone had passed away although in the cases I'm thinking about it's -- it wasn't completely unexpected. It was just I was there and the other people weren’t.  One was when my sister died. No, why am I saying my sister died? When my mom died, my sister was out with my aunt. I mean, I had come home because I knew mom was sick. There – I mean, she was now in hospice. They thought she had about six weeks or so. So I was just home to, you know, have a visit or whatever and she ended up passing away while I was home and my sister was out running errands with my -- my aunt. And so, I just had to hold it together and call, I don’t know if I called my aunt or my sister, but I said, “I think you guys should come home.” I wouldn't say why. And they didn't ask, which I was grateful for and they, they came home. I'm gonna, I'm gonna go beyond the little part of the question here, just say because I have more to talk about, delivering the bad news but, that was such a -- I've often thought about that being like this really nice gift that my mom gave me. Not that she passed away because I didn't want that to happen. But, you know, she was – I thought she had six more weeks. So this was a visit I made, and then I expected there was gonna come a phone call I would get that it was -- you know, it was time, and I would have to make that -- I would have to you know, get on a plane, and, you know, make the long drive from the airport to their house in -- like just consumed by grief either because she had passed away or was really close. And I dreaded that. I dreaded the prospect of being in that much, you know, anguish and feeling, you know, that emotionally beat up and having to do all of the travel. Just negotiating all of the travel. You know you hit…

What am I grateful for this week? I got a promotion on Tuesday so that’s really exciting and honestly unexpected because this doesn't happen often. So I'm really, really thrilled about it. It just feels kind of nice to get the title of the job that I am doing. It doesn't necessarily mean that I'm getting like a mega raise, but working in higher ed, I'd be remiss if I -- I’d be ignorant if I thought I would get one, but it's -- there's something there. So that's nice. And I'm grateful for that and my bosses were wonderful about it, so that's nice. Let's see. I also won a book from Goodreads because they do giveaways and I always sign up because I always want a chance at winning something and this time I did! So that was really cool too. So I'm really happy about that. 

If you're over a certain age limit, like, we should just all swallow our pride and and know that you're not going to be as sharp as you used to be and that you probably need to just, you know, see how good you are still at seeing and at reacting. Because you could kill someone, you could injure someone. You know, who cares if you -- I'm not gonna say "Who cares about if you injure yourself?" because that's mean, but like, you know, don't think of just yourself basically. Like, think about the people that you could run over with your car. And so, you know, we've been trying to get her [a neighbor] to stop driving for a long time. Like, "Hey, maybe you should stop driving, maybe you shouldn't be driving? Maybe you should sell your car?" And she would, she would give it a shot for a little while, and then she would go back to driving because she doesn't want to like, bother people to take her places and if her -- she can't figure out how to work her phone, she can't call a taxi or an Uber. She doesn't -- can’t even like see to use her phone doesn't understand how it works. And so, like -- and she's really nice. And so like I go over there occasionally. And the last time I went and I what I saw her across the street and I was about to go grocery shopping and I went up, I was like, "Hey, I'm about to go grocery shopping. Do you need anything?" And she goes, "Oh well, can I come with you?" And I hesitated because I had planned on going -- like, I had like four things I was gonna do, and I was, I had to order in mind of the way I was gonna do it and like grocery shopping was the last thing I was gonna do. And so, I hesitated for a second to decide, oh, can I put these other things last and do the grocery shopping first? So I was like, "Um," and then I was like, "Yeah. Okay, that's fine." But she goes, "You hesitated, you hesitated. Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. I'm gonna go to the grocery store like tomorrow with so-and-so, I don't need anything. I can wait until tomorrow." And…

I was talking to some people today about the fact that I found an engorged tick on my child -- horrifying. And that we had treated them with doxycycline, once we realized that the tick had been on for quite a while. And in the process of having that conversation, it was brought up that there is a lyme or plush, you know, tick vaccine that's being trialed in Europe and in the U.S. And it's in the third round of trials, so it's seemingly successful. And will be launched at some point. And as we were having this conversation, somebody that I was talking to said, “Oh yeah, I've heard of this.” There's this, basically, conspiracy theory that the pharma companies are dropping ticks, like increasing tick populations to try and push this basically. That was the context within which they had heard about the vaccine initially. And it just made me think about how nothing is accepted as a fact anymore. Like something, which should be celebrated, a vaccine to protect against lyme, which is you know, a very prevalent at this point, condition and can have some pretty terrible outcomes, you know, not fatalities necessarily, but chronic pain and, you know, all these things. like stuff you don't want. There used to be a time where somebody would be like, “Hey, the measles, there's a measles vaccine!” and the country would be like, “Oh! That's wonderful.” Generally speaking, maybe not 100% of people, but the majority, and now, it feels like any good thing, whether it's a lyme vaccine or something else is met with skepticism. And the hard part is, it's so impossible to gauge. Like have things actually shifted so much? Is it the case where a minority are happy about something like this? Or is it still true, the majority are happy there's just more conversation, more attention being given to people who, have these theories that are kind of outlandish? And all of that with the caveat that there have been times that the government. that pharma companies have, of course, done terrible things intentionally.

I can think right on top of my head of two songs in particular, where I have some pretty clear memories of where I was and the time and place, even though they were songs I’d heard plenty of times before and plenty of times after, and they were the two songs, just as I was pulling into the parking lot for my high school graduation back in June of 1994. Sorry, 1995, goodness! One was, “Mr. Jones” by Counting Crows, the other “Welcome To Paradise” by Green Day. And both of them, I think were on D.C. 101, one of the rock stations in the Washington D.C. area that was a little easier of the two main rock stations to pick up in the area based from where I was on the western side of the D.C. area. The other one was 99.1 HFS, and that was like, way over towards Annapolis, which maybe the translator was probably like somewhere in Rockville or Montgomery County or Prince George's or something, but the point being was -- anyway, 101 was easier to pick up so that was normally the rock station I listened to as I was driving in. And yeah, those particular songs, I remember from the playlist of graduation. And that graduation speech itself was not necessarily anything earth-shattering. We didn't have any viral moments, although admittedly those were a lot harder to create in the pre-internet era. The speaker had engagements on NPR at the time and maybe had written a book or two, and my dad actually remembers him more than I do, just for the fact that he could remember him clapping for every graduate, which he thought was, you know, a good thing that he did.

Yeah, in terms of like watching or listening to something you're not supposed to; it was funny, a couple of guys at work who I'm friends with, we were chatting about growing up with conservative Christian parents. And I mean, none of us like rebelled in like, any kind of crazy way, but we talked about like kind of, we all had like the one friend whose house you would go over to and, like, watch the stuff you weren't allowed to watch at home or listen to stuff you weren't allowed to listen to. And, and we all had like music that we would kind of sneakily listen to that our parents wouldn't approve of. And it's funny 'cause theirs were like -- gosh, I can't even remember, but way more intense than mine. Mine was Alanis Morissette. But I have this distinct memory of -- I bought my best friend in sixth grade that album, that Alanis Morissette album, maybe seventh grade, and -- she, 'cause she asked for it, and she had a party. She opened that, whatever. And then after the party, I spent the night, and her mom said, like, after everyone left her mom said, "I don't know who gave you that, but we are returning it!" Like she was so mad, and unfortunately she had already opened it, and I gave it to her, so I'm sure -- well, I know she looked down on me after that, but she couldn't return it, so we listened to it.